Thursday, September 15, 2005

laptop posture

i feel like i must be the frailest person ever, but i want to say this for all the people who use laptops extensively, which i know is a lot of people: be concerned not just about your hands, but your neck too. here's a link on good laptop ergonomics.

anyway, my hands have been feeling great for quite some time now, and i'm happy i've found a good position for them, as well as good interface devices (for laptops, i love the ibm thinkpad keyboard/red dot thingy combination).

however, i've noticed that over the past few days that my neck has been bothering me a little. the problem seems pretty obvious now: constant looking down at the laptop keyboard (i keep my laptop on my lap). the solution however is not to put the laptop on a desk, because if the laptop is high enough, than the neck will be fine, but your hands will suffer. it's the inevitable problem of laptops: by coupling the monitor with the input devices, the user is screwed no matter which way they do things.

the best thing to do is to dock your laptop and get a separate monitor and keyboard. if you can't do that, please stretch more! sometimes these problems can take years to manifest themselves, but be assured that if you have bad posture, it will catch up to you!